Seven Days: The Emergence of Robert E. Lee and the Dawn of a Legend

By Clifford Dowdey and Robert K. Krick

The Seven Days Campaign was a series of battles fought near Richmond at the end of June 1862. General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had routed General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Depriving McClellan of a military decision meant the war would continue for two more years. The Seven Days depicts a critical turning point in the Civil War that would ingrain Robert E. Lee in history as one of the finest generals of all time. Masterfully written, The Seven Days is Dowdey at his finestdetailed and riveting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781620873885

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The Year of the Settlement

IN THE SMOKY DUSK outside Richmond on May 31, 1862, a general was knocked from his horse by a shell fragment and a stray minié ball. It was one of the rarities in the history of warfare for a general commanding an army to receive a wound during battle, and Joseph E. Johnston was one of only two commanding generals to be wounded in action in the Civil War. The other general, Albert Sidney Johnston, had bled to death at Shiloh two months earlier.

Joe Johnston’s wounds came at the Battle of Seven Pines, a crossroads seven miles from Richmond, where the general was commanding in an area separated from the main action. Johnston’s part of the field spread out from a clearing at Fair Oaks Station, a stop on the Richmond and York River Railroad where it crossed Nine Mile Road. The flat countryside there was mostly wooded and heavily brushed, with entangled vines growing close to ground that, naturally spongy, had been turned into a bog by rain the night before. It was bad terrain for assaulting troops whose officers held no clear idea of the enemy’s dispositions, and the scant information possessed by Johnston happened to be wrong.

The counterattack at Seven Pines was Johnston’s first aggressive action since he assumed command of the Confederate forces in Virginia after First Manassas nearly a year before. By a series of anticipatory moves, the slight, sprightly commanding general had evaded the advances of George B. McClellan’s big army. Then, backed up on the flat, damp farm country on the outskirts of the Confederate capital, Johnston had been forced to make a stand. Though the dandified little general was a scholar of warfare, he was a lazy, hazy thinker on the details of battle preparations. The result was, as seen by Alexander, his analytical chief of ordnance, a phenomenally mismanaged battle.

Johnston’s personally directed action late in the day was really an effort to salvage the deranged plans of his first counteroffensive. He hurried forward his brigades of unseasoned troops with neither reconnaissance nor guns for support. The soldiers, innocently eager, deployed in battle lines from the mud of Nine Mile Road across the quagmire of a wide yard. In front of the snug Adams house, the men were swept by a gale of lead balls and jagged-edged slugs of canister. Their doomed fellows led forward as supports were sent slushing and threshing into the dense, dripping woods that enclosed a cleared field on three sides. By then the light was fading, and the supporting troops could only locate the Federals by the flashes of their rifles from the woods.

All three brigadier generals of the supporting troops were struck by enemy fire. One fell dead; one, left unconscious on the field, was later captured-, and huge Wade Hampton, the South Carolina grandee, stood on one foot beside his horse calling for the surgeon to come and extract a bullet from the other. Major General Gustavus Smith, second in command, was off trying to advance more supports to the already lost action.

Into this disorder and anguish, Joe Johnston went galloping across the cleared field on some frantic mission. Almost simultaneously, a partially spent musket ball struck him in the right shoulder and a fragment from an overshot shell lodged in the chest. He fell so heavily from his horse that at first he feared a spinal injury. Two staff officers hurried to the commanding general where he lay on the wet field. The light figure was carried toward the farther woods beyond range of the random fall of metal.

When the litter-bearers arrived, Johnston was conscious and asked if someone could fetch his sword and pistols. That sword was the one worn by my father in the Revolutionary War, he said, and I would not lose it for ten thousand dollars.

The lean, erect figure of Jefferson Davis approached through the dusk. The Chief Executive and the commanding general had been steadily, sometimes bitterly, at odds for the past months, but Davis leaned solicitously over the wounded man. Johnston, his consciousness failing, merely shook his head when Davis asked if he could do anything. Manifestly Johnston would be out of action for some time.

Davis returned to his horse, remounted and rode to find General R. E. Lee, the Military Adviser to the President. Lee had left his cheerless office in Richmond during the afternoon and ridden to the field to try to discover from Johnston what was going on. Though the two Virginians had been intimates since they were classmates at West Point (sharing the bond of knowledge that their fathers had served together in the Revolution), Johnston had refused to divulge any of his plans. Davis joined Lee, and together they rode to find Major General Smith and learn from him his superior’s intentions.

The handsome second in command knew little more than they. Johnston had told him, Smith said, of a misunderstanding between him and assault commander General James Longstreet, who had attacked on the wrong road and piled up the bulk of the assault force at Seven Pines. No one knew what was going on across country at Seven Pines, though it was obvious the enemy was not being driven. By then the rattle of firearms was dying off in the gathering darkness. Whatever Johnston’s plans may have been, the day was over without change in the oppressive situation confronting the defenders of Richmond. McClellan was unimpeded in the methodical advance that threatened the city with heavy siege guns the Confederates could not match.

When Davis and Lee rode back through the night to Richmond, the President was forced to the decision he had long avoided: the soldier he preferred to keep as his military adviser must be given the army and put into the field the next day. This escape from the desk, the dearest wish of Lee’s heart, marked the end of more than a year of thankless, frustrating chores remote from the major actions of the war, while Confederate centers fell and Confederate forces retreated from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, from the Ohio River to the Gulf. For the war, it marked the end of the period of attempted settlement between the sections — the year that began with McClellan’s assumption of command after First Manassas in July, i86r, and ended with Lee’s mounting of a counteroffensive in the Seven Days Battle Around Richmond.

From the night of May 31 when the President and Lee returned to Richmond, the course of the settlement by arms began to change, leading to a change in the nature of the war and finally in the ultimate objectives. More than any combination of causes or moral abstractions, the turn the settlement now took was determined by a stray piece of metal fired by an unknown battery whose gunners overshot their target. Joel Cook, a reporter for the Philadelphia Enquirer, wrote that this was the saddest shot fired during the war, for it changed the Confederate command. It brought to the test by arms the first single, controlling hand on either side.

2

Lee did not exert his profound effect on the war by the full flowering of military genius, nor yet by the harmony of the powerful elements in his nature which gave the quality of grandeur to his character. A professional soldier who, serving long in the engineers, had never led men in combat in his life, he did not assume command completely developed, as sprung from the forehead of Jove.

In the techniques of command he was a novice, inexperienced in the tactical arrangements necessary for moving in battle the separate masses of men whose actions must be coordinated over miles of obscuring terrain. The units he was to move were indifferently organized, a crude and makeshift machine compared to McClellan’s masterpiece. In committing himself to the destruction of the invading force, Lee would be using an unfamiliar and imperfect weapon.

But he did commit himself to attempt to destroy the enemy outside the city. With Lee the long retreats came to an end. Immediately discarding Johnston’s strategy of evading the enemy, Lee planned to seize the initiative and fight the enemy at points of his own selection. Although he operated within the Confederacy’s defensive policy, he abandoned its static aspects and arranged to strike a decisive counteroffensive. What he brought that changed the pattern of the armed struggle was strategy, the first introduced by the Confederates in their defense.

Since this strategy was adapted to the administration’s general policy of defense, Lee also brought to the war in Virginia the first instance in which the military objective perfectly expressed the political purposes. In this way, Lee illustrated Napoleon’s maxim, Nothing is so important in war as an undivided command.

The chance to test his strategy before he was practiced in command or his army ready to take the offensive was presented Lee by the division in command that subverted McClellan’s objectives. Without this division, McClellan’s superb army could have taken Richmond regardless of Lee. Indeed, with an undivided command McClellan could have forced the evacuation of the city before Lee assumed command. As it was, McClellan’s commander in chief, Abraham Lincoln, seemed dedicated to the proposition that Napoleon was wrong.

The political purposes which McClellan was to implement were not nearly so simple as the Confederacy’s purpose of proving its right to independence by a successful defense of its land. From Lincoln’s decision to employ armed coercion as a solution to secession, unforeseen and undesired developments began to move of their own chartless momentum. As one of the most astute politicians produced on the continent — perhaps only Jefferson and F. D. Roosevelt were his equals — Lincoln was a bold improviser who never shrank from the consequences of his improvisations. Instead, he managed to provide a sense of ordered inevitability to even the most uncontrollable events and his most demonstrable expediencies. He did this with the ambiguities of his wonderfully evocative prose, in which he used the politician’s technique of avoiding reference to earlier statements that appeared contradictory. However, in that year of attempted decision, none of his gifts — many of which, like Lee’s, were in a formative stage of development — served to bring a clarity of purpose that the military could execute.

3

The unpredictable elements began to gather when force was first tried on the modest scale of suppressing a combination formed of the seven states of the Lower South. At the outset, Lincoln miscalculated the effects of coercion when he demanded that citizens of the border states participate in the invasion of the seceded states. A Midwesterner, he failed to interpret the emotional content of the political principle of States’ Rights — that passionate attachment of a people to a place — and failed to appraise the strength of conviction that supported the principle of a federated republic of sovereign states.

When the relatively populous states of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, along with Arkansas, then seceded and joined the new confederation, the combination became a nation. It was small and pitifully poor, but the new states brought, with their manpower, an industrial nucleus, military leadership and a battleground. On this battleground twenty miles from Washington, the suppression ended with First Manassas on July 21,1861.

Thus committed to force as a solution, the Lincoln administration was compelled to the next step of mobilizing the nation’s manpower and resources. Five days after Manassas, young George McClellan arrived in Washington to disperse the armed defenders in the Southern states and to reestablish the authority of the United States in the territory embraced by the Confederacy. With McClellan came the crucial period, the one year when a settlement by arms was possible.

A more realistic appraisal of the Southerners’ determination to defend their homeland caused the Lincoln administration to concentrate its might to overwhelm the hastily improvised compact of agricultural states before they could provide adequate organization, supporting services and military material for their outmanned volunteers. However, before McClellan felt his mighty army was ready to assume the offensive, the general and the administration were at cross-purposes.

Lincoln had the sound instinct to leave the military as free from civilian interference as possible, but he was himself divided by a conflict of purposes. Along with the larger objective of restoring the Union, he held the narrower one of retaining his own party in power. A regular party man in the new Republican Party, composed of diverse elements and occupying a tenuous position in prosecuting a war that lacked popular support, Lincoln was committed to the dual objective of winning the war and securing the future of his heterogeneous party.

Among the factions in his own party, the powerful bloc of Radicals was not motivated by a desire to restore the Union as it then existed. Their purpose was to use the war to establish their party’s ascendancy in quite a new United States. In this the society of the Southern whites would be destroyed and four million slaves would be freed and enfranchised as potential Republican voters.

For their purposes the Radicals were supported by sincere abolitionists who, unaware of the political implications, permitted the zeal of moral coercion to direct their immediate goals against the Southern whites. As John Randolph, who wrote off half a million dollars in property when he manumitted four hundred slaves, observed: Southern abolition was reform and appeal to the master; Northern abolition was revolution and appeal to the slave.

Whether or not the Radical leaders were conscious of all the implications of social revolution in the forces they sought to direct, for self-interested reasons the group was more realistic than Lincoln. He was essentially trying to restore by arms a national structure which had collapsed under the stresses of peace. The Radicals, welcoming the collapse, aimed for a Union composed of the loyalist sections in which their party operated and to which the South would be added as a conquered appendage, stigmatized by rebellion and slavery. To this end, destruction must come before reconstruction. The war must be prolonged until the forcible abolition of slavery could become a reality.

Directed by the same passions that impelled the extremists of the French Revolution, the Radicals advocated extending the war beyond traditional battles between soldiers to punitive action against the civilian population. Military leaders were encouraged to run off slaves or provide sanctuary for runaways under a policy to deny any rights to those who had seceded from the old Union. In Washington, the group tried to force or persuade Lincoln to declare abolition as an objective of the war.

While McClellan prepared his invasion, Lincoln was resisting the Radicals’ importunities. Like the nonslaveholding majority of Southerners, Lincoln recognized that the abolition of slavery was not merely a moral issue but one that raised complex sociological problems of the freed Negro in a white society. The problem of the deportation of freed slaves was a stumbling block to passing abolition legislation in the 1832 session of Virginia’s General Assembly, and Lincoln himself had said that sudden emancipation would present a worse evil than slavery itself.

At the time of McClellan’s appearance, Congress passed a resolution that restricted the objectives of the war to the restoration of peace and specifically disavowed any purpose of changing Southern society. All of Lincoln’s cabinet except Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, the career abolitionist, supported him in keeping the issue of slavery out of the conflict.

Yet, though Lincoln officially refused to accede to the Radicals’ demands, privately he was careful not to antagonize that skillful, determined bloc. He controlled them by adroit appeasement. It was Lincoln’s extemporizations in relation to this appeasement, designed to present a unity of political action, that undermined the singleness of his objectives and led to a divided command.

What obscured the area of exchange between the administration and the general was the fact that McClellan personally believed in the official policy stated by Lincoln and thought the restoration of peace was the objective he was supposed to achieve. As a conservative Democrat, he naturally supported the government’s objectives of restricting the invasion to the defeat of the armed defenders and preserving the Union. Since Lincoln expressed the same views, and the Radicals vehemently pressed for a different policy, McClellan assumed that Lincoln was opposed to the Radicals.

When McClellan took command, though Lincoln was opposed to the Radicals’ policies, he was not opposed to the Radicals as a strong bloc in his party. Along with this distinction, which McClellan missed, Lincoln gradually changed under the mounting pressures during the year of the settlement and the growth of the Radical influence.

For his part, McClellan proceeded with a deliberateness that antagonized the Radicals, as well as arousing criticism in segments of the press and the general public, and this placed a strain upon Lincoln. While the President, improvising and ambiguous, did not deal forthrightly with the general, McClellan could not deal forth-rightly with either Lincoln or himself. For as Lincoln was committed to a dual purpose, so was McClellan: he wanted to restore the Union and gain recognition as the hero who accomplished it.

During the course of their undeclared conflict, neither McClellan nor Lincoln was the man of his historic image. Lincoln, of course, experienced later growth, and the postwar apotheosis tended to present a somewhat mythical character. McClellan experienced the misfortune of being presented to the future by his enemies.

The ambitious general provided them with ammunition by his vainglory, his arrogance, and his undiplomatic treatment of politicians. In a winner, the same traits would have been presented as color, dynamism and the scorn of a forceful character dismissing unqualified importunists. But McClellan was not only a loser: to the Radicals he had the wrong attitude.

Though circumstances and his own ego make it easy to judge McClellan by his less admirable traits and actions, the fact is that the complex, extraordinarily gifted man was wholly right in his idea for crushing the resistance in Virginia. His campaign, from July to July, was the only imaginative offensive ever mounted against Richmond. Beyond that, it was the military execution of a clear political objective and held the possibility, as one of Lincoln’s cabinet members said of McClellan’s strategy, of preserving the Union without destroying the nation. And he might even have achieved that, despite the government’s interference with his army and his plans, except for the stroke of bad fortune that removed from Confederate command the general whose defensive techniques were ideally designed for the triumph of McClellan’s methods.

4

Before Lee took command, McClellan did not have to fear the enemy’s exploitation of the internal conflicts in the Federal command. Also, the Confederacy’s static policy of resistance negated the natural advantages of defense. With interior lines of communication, with nearly one thousand miles of front and another thousand miles of coastal line pierced by rivers offering inland passage to amphibious forces, the Confederates undertook the stultifying assignment of defending everywhere. Though this policy was a true expression of the new nation’s political objective, as operated under Jefferson Davis it ignored the broader strategies of counteroffensives possible within the defensive system, and continually yielded the initiative to the invading forces.

This policy was supported by nearly all civil and military authorities, except Lee, who was not consulted. The troubled men in Richmond, like their Washington counterparts, were not the figures of the historic image as they groped their way from new problem to new problem in the uncertainties of that year. Many Confederates wished to return to the Union, on good terms for the South. Davis had been deeply sorrowed when his state, Mississippi, left the Union, and he accepted the undesired office of President with no aggressive intent.

As Jefferson Davis was the leader of the Confederacy, many failures were attributed to him that were inherent in the young nation’s political structure and slim resources. In establishing a nation from nothing, and maintaining it under powerful attack with very little, Davis was forced to spread his attention over an enormous and complex range of problems. In conscientiously struggling with a succession of crises from all sides, Davis was most remarkable for the consistency of his adherence to the principles at issue. Yet, this preoccupation with principles — with his well-reasoned theories of constitutionalities and abstract justice — reflected the man’s fundamental weakness as a revolutionary leader. An inner insecurity, an unadmitted fear of inadequacy, caused Davis to hold rigidly to anything that gave him a sense of security.

Thus he clung to an established operation whether or not it achieved the desired results. In this way the unpragmatic man established a bureaucratic system, wasteful and inefficient, that only a rich nation such as the United States could afford. Within this system he could never delegate real authority to anyone because of an instinctive fear of the operation getting out of his control.

Extended into military policy, this need made him establish departments to bring all field operations into an orderly system in which he could plan to meet every contingency. The antithesis of confident improvisers, such as Lincoln and Lee, Davis was like McClellan in feeling he had to provide against the possibility of unforeseen contingencies. As war is dealing with infinite combinations of the unpredictability of human behavior in the greatest concentrations, successful command requires quick reactions to the unexpected and the ability to exploit the unplanned. Lee acted on this by instinct. By instinct Davis sought to protect himself against the unpredictable. He arranged to contain the enemy’s movements within a fixed system of preparation.

The resulting inflexibility in the Confederate defensive system reflected the personal inflexibility which many of Davis’s contemporaries criticized in his character. This rigidity was not, as his detractors presumed, an expression of overbearing egotism, though he was certainly not modest. It was the defensiveness of a proud man whose need to be right went too deeply into his character for him to consider opposing positions or to consider the consequences of the tactlessness with which he asserted his authority.

During the year when all leaders were testing procedures and methods in unprecedented situations, neither president had determined on a satisfactory, effective relationship between civil and ?military authorities. In a nation without the tradition of a military establishment, and in which two of its greatest heroes, Washington and Jackson, had been civilians, both presidents in their different approaches acted on the assumption that they were at least as well qualified as the generals.

Lincoln, without military training, concentrated in the realm of decisions, and only used the authority of his office when he grew dissatisfied with McClellan, Davis, with a military background and actually preferring to serve in the field, took literally the title of commander in chief and concentrated on the army’s organization. Because of Davis’s preoccupation with details and Johnston’s un-cooperativeness in conducting the passive defense, the Confederacy’s command was worse than divided: it was a vacuum.

5

During the period when McClellan was permitted to construct his great army at leisure, Lee, off on mundane assignments, was no factor whatsoever in the war in Virginia. In March, 1862, with the gathering threat to Richmond, Lee was hurriedly recalled to the capital for advice and for what amounted to staff work in the emergency. In this ignominious capacity Lee managed, by an unsuspected guile, to introduce some cause-and-effect tactics in the Shenandoah Valley front. Without his knowledge, the larger effect was to widen the breech between McClellan and Lincoln. In turn, this produced an even larger effect on McClellan himself. Lacking his government’s confidence, the Young Napoleon ponderously inched his armored forces forward to within sound of Richmond’s church bells.

While Washington politicians grew frantic at the absence of thrilling battles in his campaign, deliberate McClellan, without risking a major engagement, had approached the position from which he could force the evacuation of Richmond. Unlike Washington as a symbolic capital, Richmond was more like Paris and London as a true center. Containing the largest industrial operations in the South, at that time it was the only producer of heavy ordnance, the major producer of light ordnance and ammunition, and, as a transportation hub at the top of the South Atlantic tier, it served as the center of operations for supply and other supporting services.

Beyond its importance as a city, Richmond acted as a fortress for the food-producing region from the Atlantic Ocean to the mountains west of the fertile Shenandoah Valley. In turn, this swath served as a buffer for the vast territory from south of the James River, at Richmond, to the Gulf of Mexico, Finally, railroads at Richmond connected the northeastern Confederacy with Tennessee and the country west of the Alleghenies. McClellan was right in believing that the capture of Richmond would mark the beginning of the end — an end that, as he desired, would come with a minimal dislocation to Southern society and a minimal bitterness between the contestants.

For McClellan to win this glory, to become literally the savior of the Union, was the last thing the Radicals wanted. A Democratic hero would immediately threaten their tenure in Washington. Then, with no possibility of promoting forcible abolition and enfranchising the freed Negroes without the existence of a national emergency, the political abolitionists would lose their cause for being.

At this stage Lee stepped into the vacuum and achieved in one month what the Radicals could not have achieved without him: he prevented a settlement in the year of the limited use of force for restricted political objectives.

Lee had won his position of influence by a subordination of self not in the character of McClellan and Johnston. He gained the trust of his government by a deep assurance that, like Lincoln’s, gave him no need either to prove himself or to assert his own ego in personality exchanges. There was a kinglike quality in his leadership, as if by divine right, and he was the product of a society that had trained its superior individuals for authority. That society of Colonial Virginia, which produced the post-Revolutionary dynasty in Washington, began to wane when Lee was growing up, but it formed him — a product of the last late flowering of Virginia’s golden age.

Again, like Lincoln, he was a product of the old America. But also like the Radicals — though for wholly different reasons — he accepted the end of the seventy-one-year-old political union of that older America. It was not that he wanted anything new any more than Lincoln did. He simply wanted his region of the old America established outside a union which, as he said, had to be held together by bayonets. As a professional soldier having no stake in the institution of slavery (he was engaged in the distasteful chore of manumitting the slaves of his late father-in-law, foster-son of George Washington) and disbelieving in secession as a political remedy, his course was determined solely by reaction to coercion.

With his aggressive strategy reduced to the simple truism, A good offense is the best defense, Lee made the Seven Days Battle the single most significant military engagement of the war. The decisiveness of the Seven Days lay in its effect on the course of the resolution by arms: as a climax, a culmination, of the year of the attempted settlement, it heralded the end of the effort to restore the Union as it then existed. By preventing a settlement in 1862, the Seven Days prepared the way for the war of subjugation according to the Radicals’ purposes, chief among which was the introduction of the slavery issue in the preservation of the political Union by armed force.

Without Lee’s counteroffensive the Union could have been restored without slavery becoming an issue and establishing a course in which, under the resurrected banners of moral coercion, the Negro again became a political issue one century later. Though the Radical leaders in Lincoln’s government never claimed Lee as an ally, nor have histories mentioned his unsung contribution to their plans, the tragedy of the Virginian was that, in preventing a settlement in 1862, he served the purposes of those elements who ultimately brought the rule of terrorists to the South.

The Divided Command

CHAPTER ONE

Passion Spins the Plot

WHEN thirty-four-year-old General George B. McClellan arrived in Washington on July 26, 1861, after the debacle of First Manassas, the streets, bars and hotel lobbies were clogged with soldiers wandering aimlessly in defeat. Five days after the battle, demoralized federal officers and men continued to limp across the bridges into the city. Across the river on the rolling plains of Northern Virginia, the Confederates had advanced outposts to within ten miles of the bridges to Washington. Upstream, cavalry patrols had appeared near the river, led by a red-bearded, twenty-eight-year-old colonel — lately a lieutenant in the U. S. Army — J. E. B. Stuart. The troopers were fine-looking outdoorsmen, mounted on blooded horses and lounging carelessly in the saddles as if watching a sporting event instead of surveying a system of forts.

These were the results of Lincoln’s attempted quick suppression of the combination of seceded states when McClellan was enthusiastically welcomed as the savior of the nation. Fresh from his triumph in Virginia’s western mountains and, as was said, a gallant figure, the handsome young general fitted the image of a man of destiny. Unawed by public adulation and the deference of Washington leaders, he showed only confidence when conferring with President Lincoln, the venerable general in chief Winfield Scott, cabinet members, senators and swarms of highly placed opportunists who saw the nation’s first hero of the war as the architect of the future.

Though outwardly unimpressed, McClellan was by no means unaffected. A shining success both in the army and in civilian life, McClellan recognized that circumstances had given him the greatest opportunity that could come to any man in his generation. By some strange magic I seem to have become the power of the land he wrote his wife. All tell me that I am responsible for the fate of the nation, and that all its resources shall be placed at my disposal.

McClellan assumed his role with the conviction that the nation’s resources were indeed at his disposal and that he could use them in his own way. Lincoln gave tacit support to this attitude when he accepted without comment the general plan McClellan submitted on August 2. This paper was a development of a plan McClellan had submitted to Scott in May, and which had attracted the old general’s attention to him.

McClellan’s suggestion held the same military objectives and political purposes as Scott’s own disregarded Anaconda Plan. Both plans aimed at a settlement between the dissidents by building a broad-fronted military force beyond the capacity of the Confederates to resist. While Scott’s emphasis was on an interior blockade — with control of the Mississippi a primary objective so as to exploit the rivers that sliced into Confederate territory — McClellan’s emphasis was on the strength of the ground forces. Both planned a concentration of power capable of overwhelming any resistance with a minimum of fighting on the Southerners’ land. Both felt that defense of their homes would harden the spirit of dissidence and, as General Scott, the old Virginian, warned, If you invade the South, 1 guarantee that at the end of a year you will be further from a settlement than you are now.

In calling for nearly three hundred thousand men for the main army in the East, McClellan justified the immensity of his project by saying, I understand it to be the purpose of this great nation to reestablish the power of the Government and restore peace to its citizens in the shortest possible time.

While Lincoln evidently did not then accept the necessity for this grand scale advance, he showed a desire to support McClellan as far as he possibly could. In those midsummer days the President sought McClellan’s company, appeared often at his house on H Street, and offered George every evidence of support. The men had been acquainted before the war when Lincoln was attorney for the railroad of which McClellan was president. Lincoln’s attitude of trust and approval caused McClellan to assume that lack of comment on the plan implied acquiescence. He could do what he wanted.

2

While George McClellan believed his plan was accepted, his own motives were not restricted to restoring peace by amassing an irrestible force. By his method, McClellan risked no defeat himself. His plan was a perfect product of a union of conviction and ambition, and McClellan had a habit of success.

Born of a Philadelphia family of modest means, he had been blessed by good looks, a brilliant mind and a charming personality. Directed by ambition and supported by energy, McClellan’s native gifts formed a quality at once colorful and dynamic, a force which opened the way all his life. He received special dispensation to enter West Point two years before the prescribed age and graduated before twenty at the head of his class. Brevetted in the Mexican War, where he served with Lee as an engineer on Scott’s staff, he was appointed by Jefferson Davis, then secretary of war, to a commission of military scientists to study the Crimean War. Leaving the army to enter the lucrative field of railroad engineering, at thirty-four he was earning the impressive salary of $10,000 a year as railroad president.

He came into the war as major general in charge of Ohio volunteers and was soon promoted to major general in the U. S. Army. For his first campaign in western Virginia, McClellan had organized his force of twenty thousand with characteristic attention to detail. The deliberate advance of his compact forces, superbly equipped and supplied and avoiding all risks, had proven irresistible. In contrast to the luckless General Irwin McDowell’s campaign in the environs of Washington, McClellan’s decisive victory caused him to be hailed as the Young Napoleon. The significance of his victory appeared greater at the time than it does today: he had conquered a part of Virginia and had freed it from the Rebels.

The public was ignorant both of the small numbers of crudely equipped and poorly organized Confederates opposing McClellan and of the deep-seated political disaffection in the region that was to become West Virginia. Native loyalist leaders in the northwest counties seized the opportunity to sever ties with the Old Dominion (an antisecession convention in Wheeling would lead to the formation of a separate state) and formed alliances with the Union forces in Ohio to clear the way for McClellan’s advance. Until the scattered Confederates, totaling not more than five thousand, neared the area in the Alleghenies which is now the border between the two states, they had been fighting in country at best neutral and at worst more hostile to them than to McClellan’s soldiers. McClellan naturally did not emphasize the enemy’s deficiencies in his dispatches, but he could not have been unaware of the weak opposition he had faced.

In the main theater, McClellan obviously planned to repeat on a larger scale the methods that had worked so well in western Virginia. Nevertheless, he recognized that a Confederate army entrenched on Virginia’s homeland would be a different proposition from the bands in the western mountains.

Having known Southerners intimately at the Military Academy and in the Old Army, he appreciated the passion with which they would defend their land. He was personally acquainted with many of the officers, whom he knew to be soldiers of skill and courage. The Confederates were comparatively well armed — partly owing to the rifles, ordnance and equipment captured at Manassas — and at least as well trained. Their ranks contained a high proportion of hardy, self-reliant country types who had been familiar with weapons all their lives. Then, too, the army commanded by Johnston possessed the morale created by victory.

McClellan had inherited some fifty thousand infantry, whose state of morale, discipline and training was indicated by the need to dismiss more than two hundred officers. In forming his troops, including fresh recruits, into twelve divisions, McClellan could appoint only novice generals to command. Scarcely half of these were potentially more than adequate, and at least two were unfit. McClellan himself had been no more than a captain of engineers and had as much to learn as his subordinates about coordinating large bodies in battle and in maneuver. Little more than half the men he requested came to him, and by the end of the year he could not have fielded more than one hundred thousand combat troops.

Though these were enough to drive Johnston’s army, which numbered less than fifty thousand of all arms, it was unlikely that a decisive battle could be won. No more impetuous than McClellan, Johnston was not apt to commit his troops to battle against unfavorable odds, Johnston had one hundred miles behind him in which he could withdraw by stages. In that withdrawal would come the skirmishes, the rear guard actions, the small battles, which would take McClellan deeper and deeper into the enemy’s country, until the Confederates could turn to fight on conditions of their choosing. This, above all, was what McClellan wished to avoid. Even if his career had not been at stake, McClellan could not have justified an advance on solely military grounds for at least three months.

During those three months until November I, while Johnston showed no aggressive intent, McClellan’s personal ambitions became more involved with the retirement of General in Chief Scott. Seventy-five-year-old Scott should have retired without any prodding. His huge body, once an impressive monument to his pride, was wracked by disease and infirmities of age, and, unable to mount a horse, he could only spend his time propped on a sofa at army headquarters. In no condition to direct the details of proliferating armies, the vain former hero clung to his nominal authority and refused to leave the scene of his triumph. After briefly bearing the indignity of McClellan’s making minor dispositions without consulting him, in early August he had exploded when his subordinate sent a memorandum on the Washington defenses directly to Lincoln.

Scott wrote the President an outraged letter, accusing McClellan of having continually operated as if he, Scott, did not exist. The accusation was apparently justified. McClellan did regard the ancient Virginian as an incubus from another age. But Lincoln did not know what to do with him. Nobody did. When McClellan continued to disregard him, and when the embittered old man could rally no support for his case, Scott made use of a new law which permitted him to retire on November i with full honors. Not until then did the Young Napoleon assume the title and full duties of general in chief.

Before this immediate ambition was fulfilled, McClellan began to be criticized for not taking action against Johnston’s army. Both Radical politicians and segments of the public had grown impatient for McClellan to drive the Confederates away. In their growing security from the Confederate threat, and having learned nothing from McDowell’s defeat, the civilians began to stress the element of time which McClellan had ignored in the statement of his plans.

While Scott remained general in chief and in command of the Federal forces on the South Atlantic and in the West, no significant action had been taken anywhere. But McClellan was the new hero to

Reviews for Seven Days

[wildbill_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the first book by this author that I have read and I was pleasantly surprised. I liked the book very much for a number of reasons. It was well written and full of interesting details. The author's writing had a journalistic style, similar to Bruce Catton. Dowdey wrote a book of military history strictly from the Southern point of view. The actions of the Northern armies were described only as they made an impact on the armies of the South. The only political history discussed was that part that had an impact on the Southern army. The topic of slavery was largely absent, it just wasn't what the author was writing about. Given those restrictions the book was very informative and entertaining. When I say entertaining I mean that listening to the book was truly enjoyable.At the beginning of the Seven Days battles the troops of McClellan could see the spires of the churches in Richmond. At the end the Union forces had been pushed back to the James River. The author states that this campaign lengthened the war by at least a year and a half. He argues this premise in several places in the book and is very convincing.I listened to an audio edition of this book and I was glad to find there is a e-book edition at a decent price. Several times I wanted to look back at a portion of the book and I couldn't. The author made excellent use of descriptive language in describing the battles and the people involved. His approach was very direct. One good example is his description of Jackson's behavior during the campaign. He spent a lot of time not doing very much. Many times the call was heard "Where is Jackson?" and he was taking a nap. Dowdey counts the hours Jackson was marching or in the saddle prior to arriving at his assigned position and states that he was suffering from stress fatigue. This book was published almost fifty years ago so this is not some trendy new age diagnosis. Many other authors describe Jackson's strange behavior but this is one of the first I remember using this straightforward common sense description of the problem.The author's style of writing helped me to follow the action in the battles across the terrain. His description of the position of troops in one battle, three concave rows of rifle pits backed up by artillery, created a mental picture I could easily understand. This almost made up for the lack of maps in the audiobook.Dowdey did very good biographical sketches of many of the participants. He included thorough biographies of men such as Benjamin Huger and Theophilus Holmes, generals who are often slighted. He followed many of the men to the end of their career. A lot of the interaction between the different generals is included. In one incident James Longstreet made Benjamin Huger's troops wait while Longstreet's troops marched by, even though it was Huger who was supposed to lead the attack. Lee was constantly frustrated by the failure of his generals to carry out his orders.I am sure I will listen to this book again. I have already found another book by this author and am reading it. I recommend it for all and especially Civil War buffs.